Well, first you take a great illustrator, like Christophe, Gobelins graduate who worked for years as a storyboarder and animator, and who has countless movies and cartoons under his belt, who now gets his kicks creating all sorts of characters and creatures for our games…

Then you take a nice talented animator, like Anthony, who just got out of the LISAA art school in Paris, and, under Christophe’s close supervision, you have Anthony take the critter, cut it up into pieces, add a bone to each element, compose the skeleton in just a few clicks, and finally bring it to life by animating it… It’s that simple.

The idea behind our animation system is to be able to animate any kind of image. The image may be a 3D rendering, an India ink drawing, a modelling clay background, an image drawn on a graphics tablet or a scanned image, and so on. In fact, any visual source can be used. We put the focus on freedom and simplicity, to make it easy to start a project and add content without much hassle.

Once the drawing is ready, an in-house tool lets us add the skeleton and determines which part of the drawing will move and how. Then all the animator has to do is design the animation poses, and the tool takes care of the image deformation.

If you’re into the technical stuff, we use 2D patches to contort sections of the image with a level of complexity that can adapt to the potential needs of the final rendering and the target machine. This technique adapts remarkably well to this type of animation and gives excellent performances in a real-time context.

Much more info to come!

The UBIart team

In this video : Christophe Villez, Anthony Le Du
Music : Christophe Héral
Produced by : Céline Tellier

Well, to be honest, we would love to release a biiiiiig episode of Rayman Origins this year on HD consoles.
Why in full HD?
Simply because the game already runs in this incredible image format and this really highlights the artist’s work. This doesn’t prevent us from thinking about other consoles but we are a small team so we need to set priorities.
Why episodes?
To release one this year, and because big games take a long time to make, which in turns makes their price high.
With episodes, the price must be proportional to the size of the game, there is no way we are taking gamers for fools!
Episodes also let us imagine a longer and more developed saga than with a more “classical” format.
Oh yes, and there is a golden rule: the size of each episode and its replayability must be important enough to make the players feel … fulfilled.

Since the beginning of our project we seek to limit the repetitive tasks to keep the team as small as possible and to keep it happy
To achieve this, we use image deformation and looping techniques,
From a graphical point of view, our tools enable us to generate animations and sceneries in very high definition from veeeeery little original artwork.
As an example, the entire Rayman Origins trailer runs real time at 60fps in full HD (1920*1080) and required the intervention of only a few graphic artists.
In the days to come we will cover the different techniques that enable us to achieve these results.